


You Got Lucky

by glasscaskets



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - No Powers, Alternate Universe - Sports, Child Abuse, Gay Panic, Hockey, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, OH GOD IT'S A HIGH SCHOOL AU, The Eighties, of a very minor sort, steve rogers has the social skills of a punctured bag of flour, upstate new york bleakness
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-06-01
Updated: 2016-05-31
Packaged: 2018-07-11 12:37:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,888
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7051801
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glasscaskets/pseuds/glasscaskets
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Steve Rogers, a gymnast with too much imagination and too few friends, is sent to summer school, where he meets Bucky Barnes, a hockey player with no space for imagination and no time for friends. And there is absolutely nothing gay about it at all. (There is.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	You Got Lucky

            **One**

 

Bucky Barnes was thirteen years old when Herb Brooks’s U.S. hockey team defeated the toweringly unchallenged Soviet team 4 to 3 and securing a victory that felt, at the time, far more significant than the subsequent American victory of Finland to take home the gold in ice hockey for the 1980 Olympics. Bucky and his father were glued to the television for the entire game, accepting scrambled eggs from Bucky’s exasperated little sister for dinner because they couldn’t risk taking their eyes from the screen. When the Americans won, Bucky’s father shouted in pure joy, leapt to his feet, and clapped Bucky hard on the back. It was the most unmitigated happiness Bucky had ever seen his father express.

            The morning after, on February 23rd, 1980, Bucky’s father decided Bucky would play for the U.S. Olympic hockey team.

            By that winter, Bucky had been playing hockey for seven years, and for four or five of them with some distinction. His father, who had been his coach, occasionally formally and always informally, across his career, announced with a manic glint in his eye over a breakfast of corn flakes and black coffee strong enough to power a car, that Bucky had what it took.

            From that moment on, Bucky’s life—which had previously been about school, church, hockey, and being thirteen, in roughly that order—became about hockey. Hockey, and then school, and then hockey, and then more hockey, and then maybe the rest. And then some hockey. If Bucky didn’t quite share his father’s enthusiasm for his own Olympic potential, he did love to be skating, and at thirteen didn’t mind being told by a parent that school didn’t matter much.

            And so, for the next three years, Bucky woke up every morning at 4:45 to practice before school began, and went from school to the rink at 3 to practice with his father until team practice began at 5. He was in bed, every night, by 9:45 sharp, lights out, or his father would have his head.

Having outgrown his high school team, Bucky played for the city, solidly but without much distinction. His footwork was good, and he had a delicate way of handling the puck a few coaches had called interesting, and he was a perfectly serviceable player, but nothing—no amount of sleepless practice or perfect regimentation or skating with gritted teeth to ignore the shrill shooting pain of a broken rib or weekends spent circling his father on the frozen pond behind his nana’s farmhouse, ever seemed to give him the electricity he’d seen on TV that night of the miracle on ice. This failure—not to do anything in particular, but to _be_ the right way—was the one for which his father was fundamentally unable to forgive him. 

But he liked to skate—especially alone, early in the mornings, by himself in a city rink, hours before it opened properly, by special arrangement his father made, watching the slowly rising sun filter through the white-tinted high windows and hit the championship flags in the rafters and the foggy ice and his father watching from the bleachers with a cup of coffee in his hand. Bucky liked it then, when he was flying.

 

 

**Two**

 

On the first day of high school, Steve Rogers told himself he was going to finally have friends. There were several reasons for this, among them—(1) even loser kids made at least _one_ friend in high school, and (2) he absolutely _had_ to have a growth spurt or else, if he didn’t, he’d be forced to join the circus as the World’s Tiniest Boy, who could also do a split, and (3) he could do a split. And two backflips before landing. And a bunch of other cool shit that someone learns to do when their mother signs them up for a gymnastics class because it’s cheaper than a babysitter, and then they never stop. Which may, or may not, have been the reason behind Steve’s considerable skill in gymnastics.

The reason didn’t matter—and neither did the fact that on the face of it, gymnastics sounded like a girl thing. Because while he patently didn’t look it, at five feet one inch exactly and weighing a painfully pitiful eighty-eight pounds, but Steve was very, very strong. His slender, reedy limbs were ropes of taut muscle, and his lightness only made it easier to propel his own body through the air, a projectile, a satellite, a fabulous display. He could curl and contort himself into a missile of a body, into something almost otherworldly, and he did. He could _fly_.

All this notwithstanding, Steve made it through most of his first year of high school without making any friends. His mom said it was probably because he could be a little abrasive. His father said it was probably because he was a little shit. Personally, Steve was inclined to blame his weird wheezy voice, partial deafness, propensity for squinting and coughing and stress vomiting, and the fact that he’d missed, all told, between illness and gymnastics competitions, thirty days of school.

“That,” his English teacher had informed him gravely, “is almost two months of school days.”

So by late April Steve had resigned himself to summer school, and was considering _actually_ running away to join the circus when he did something he’d never, actually, done before: he made a friend.

“World’s tiniest boy, the flying trapeze artist? That doesn’t really roll off the tongue, does it?” 

Steve leapt about a foot in the air and slapped his biology notebook—in which he’d been doodling a comic he had, in fact, labeled _world’s tiniest boy the flying trapeze artist_ —against his chest. He was sitting on the wall outside school, waiting to flag his mom down on her way home from work in a few hours—sorting out the summer school nightmare had kept him past the bus’s departure time—and _someone_ had come up behind him.

Steve turned to glare, and found himself faced with a big, warm grin from under a Kangol hat. 

“It’s—what—I’ll change the name,” he stammered, and Kangol Hat Guy laughed. He had real facial hair, which made Steve hate him a little bit.

“Sorry,” said the guy, “I’m Sam.” He stuck out his hand, like they were meeting at some kind of gentlemen’s club or something, but Steve shook it tentatively. “I shouldn’t have made fun of you,” he said, “it’s just a cool picture, and the name—it’s funny. Sorry.”

“It’s just my biology notebook,” said Steve, very stupidly, and then he realized he was still shaking Sam’s hand. He withdrew it immediately and stuck it in his jacket pocket, and hoped Sam didn’t think he was racist or something for that, like he had to wipe his hand or something. He’d once seen an old lady at the grocery store wipe he hands down with a hanky after the black cashier handed her some change. He took his hand back out of his pocket and set it on his lap, then forced himself to stop thinking about what he was doing with his hand. “I’m Steve,” he said, finally.

“Hey, Steve,” said Sam easily, and turned so his back was to Steve. Steve was about to smack himself in the face with his pencil for behaving like an unforgivable spaz, but then Sam just hopped up onto the wall next to Steve and swung his legs around so they were sitting side-by-side.

            “You’re in my math class,” Sam said, cheerfully, and took off his hat and set it neatly in his lap.

            “I am?”

            Sam laughed. “I’m not surprised you don’t know me,” he said. “You’re always—” He hunched over, squinted, and pantomimed scribbling furiously in a notebook. He sat back up and smiled at Steve, like he was checking Steve didn’t take it as an insult. “And I sit up near the front, anyways. You drawing more Tiny-Guy?”

            “Wha— _no_.” It had never before occurred to Steve that another human being might notice him, might take note of how he acted, especially in a place like math class, where he didn’t call any attention to himself. He could tell he was blushing blotchy and furiously, and he was impossibly frustrated with himself for it. “No. I’m—that’s just a stupid—I’m taking _notes_.”

            “Oh, okay,” Sam said, laughing again, “he’s a _scholar_.”

            Steve laughed then too, and a boxy red VW Beetle rounded the corner and pulled up towards the wall. “That’s my ride,” Sam said, indicating the humming, battered car with his head and the very pretty girl with big plastic earrings behind the wheel.

            “Is that your mom?” Steve asked.

            “No,” said Sam, in a voice that conveyed _weirdo_ with more fondness than such tones usually did when directed at Steve, “it’s my sister. Do you need a ride?”

            Steve hesitated. He didn’t want to admit his plan was to sit on the wall until 6:30 and hope his mom remembered to come home this way so he could flag her down, or else give up and walk four miles home. He didn’t want to admit he missed the bus because he was getting a summer school assignment, or that his useless lungs had kept him away from school for way more time, in truth, than gymnastics ever did, or that even if he’d caught the stupid bus he still would have had to walk a mile from the bus stop to get out to his stupid little house in the boonies.

But then Sam’s pretty sister honked the horn of her Bug, and Steve jumped and then and he said, “Yeah, okay.”

            It turned out to be lucky Steve was so small, because folding into the back of Sam’s sister’s car was not a task for the faint of heart or the bulky of limb. Gymnast or not, he was so awkward cramming into the back that he had a very strong urge to tumble back onto the pavement and walk home anyways, but then Sam said, “—and Sarah, this is my friend Steve,” and Steve blushed and smiled to himself.

            For the rest of the year Steve did two more things he’d never done before: he looked forward to math class, and he had a ride home at the end of the day.

 

            **Three**

 

            About once a week, Bucky had to worry that his father was going to either have a heart attack or murder someone, and when Bucky brought home a letter informing the Parents of James B. Barnes that their son would be required to attend the summer school sessions for July and August of 1983, Bucky began to worry he would find a way to do both simultaneously.

            “Are you _fucking_ joking me?” he yelled, for the seventh or eighth time, picking the letter up from where he’d last chucked it and staring at it like it might produce a new message, like it might reveal itself to be a joke or a test of his patience ordained from on high after all. “I mean it, honestly, is this someone’s idea of a fucking joke?!”

            “Dad,” said Bucky softly.

            “Oh, I will talk to this principle of yours, kid, Jesus, who the fuck does he think he is— _summer_ school?”

            “ _Dad_ —”

            “You don’t have _time_ for this shit, Buck, you need to be _training_ , you need to be focusing on your—I mean, Jesus Christ, who does this bastard think he is, writing a fucking letter like this? It’s not like you’re failing!”

            “Well. Actually,” said Bucky.

            “The school knows perfectly well you have priorities,” his father continued, wadding the letter up into a ball and throwing it on the counter for the fourth time. It rolled off and fell onto the floor. “You’re not a normal student— _summer school_ , like, like what, you’re stupid or something? I mean, so you’re not book smart, what’s the point, Jesus!”

            “ _Dad_ ,” said Bucky, firmly, stooping to pick the crumpled letter up off the floor. “I’m technically not failing, but my grades are really bad, and colleges—”

            “ _Colleges_?”

            Bucky braced himself—he knew what was coming now.  He had, in his father’s estimation, a great many more important things to be worrying about than college—and by “a great many” he really meant “hockey.” And various subdivisions of “hockey,” like “practicing hockey,” “talking about hockey,” “playing hockey,” “planning to go to the Olympics playing hockey,” and, since it was vacation after all, “maybe sometimes watching hockey.”

             Bucky viscerally pictured slicing his own neck with his skate and chewed his cheek through his dad’s vein-bursting lecture, and then smoothed out the letter against his pants and made a lot of promises about training—an extra hour here, a promise to put in some more work there—and dug a beer out of the fridge and passed it to his dad, placating.

             “I suppose it’s better do this now than have them call the house and raise a fuss,” his father sighed, popping the top off the bottle and looking Bucky over in something between resigned affection and muted disgust. “Don’t see why it’s so hard to keep your grades above a C anyways.”

            Bucky picked his dad’s bottle cap off the counter and folded it into his palm, letting the sharp folded edges dig hard into his palm. He imagined slipping tomorrow morning at training, becoming entangled in his own skate laces, falling and breaking his spine.

            _Don’t see why it’s so hard to keep your spine unbroken_ , he heard his dad’s voice say.

 

            **Four**

 

            All told, summer school was not anywhere as terrible as Steve was expecting it to be. The reasons for this were threefold: (1) when the temperature climbed past ninety degrees and the prewar, un-air conditioned school rooms more or less literally baked, nobody gave much of a shit about finishing the lesson and let everyone go home early; (2) the rest of the time he was pretty much free to draw and occasionally turn in a half-finished worksheet, and what were they going to do, send him to summer school? Yeah, exactly. And (3) after school was over, he got to hang out with his _friend_ , Sam, who invited him along with Sarah and his brother Gideon to the pool at the Y and whooped and cheered when Steve did a backflip into the pool, and who also took him out for fries and to movies and even met his mom and saw his shitty house and was nice about it, and who absolutely loved the stupid comic strips Steve drew of the two of them during summer school. True to his word, Steve changed World’s Tiniest Boy’s name, to Captain A, whose adventures with his friend Sam, alias The Falcon, were sometimes noir or Superman-inspired but mostly ripped shamelessly off _Raiders of the Lost Arc_. Steve felt apt wiling away his summer school history classes drawing himself and Sam socking Nazis in the jaw.

            There were a handful of other kids in summer school with him, most of whom Steve never talked to, but one of them was always late, which even Steve thought took some balls for summer school.

            One such occasion was on Steve’s birthday in early July, when the kid stumbled in no fewer than forty minutes late and with an enormous duffle bag over his shoulder.

            “Ah, yes,” said the teacher, dryly, “our future Olympian.”

            Steve—whose artfully detailed escapist fantasies often, when they weren’t Indiana Jones-inspired, involved competing in the Olympics—looked up, and gave the kid a proper look. He was tall and visibly bulky under his t-shirt, in a way no rising eleventh-grader had any right to be. His hair was down to his chin and shiny, and he, too, had some facial hair, though it was patchy and not as nice as Sam’s, which made Steve feel better.

            “Sorry,” the kid mumbled to the teacher, and hurried to take his seat in the back. Next to Steve.

            “Where were you?” Steve asked, because the guy’s hair and collar were sweaty and his duffle bag could almost certainly comfortably hold Steve _himself_.

            “Hockey practice,” the kid said, still a mumble, his eyes on the desk. “Do you have any—I don’t have my school stuff.” He sounded painfully embarrassed, as if was somehow something Steve was going to make fun of him for. “Do you have paper and a pencil?”

            Steve ripped a page free from his notebook and handed it, ragged edge and all, to the hockey kid. “I only have a pen,” he said, a bit apologetically. He held out the pen, blushing a little when he realized its cap was visibly chewed on, and wagged it a bit. The guy didn’t look up, apparently unable to see Steve through his thick hair.

            “Hey,” said Steve, and poked the guy’s arm with the pen. The kid jumped a little and turned his head to look at Steve. “I only have a pen,” Steve repeated, “and I chewed it. That’s gross. Sorry.”

            The guy smiled then, and he had very straight white teeth and a very pink mouth and Steve liked his smile. “Thanks,” he said, apparently unbothered by the bite marks all over the cap.

            “I’m Steve.”

            “Bucky,” said the guy.

            “That sounds like a name for a squirrel,” Steve says, before he can stop himself, and then reminds himself that it’s shit like this that gets him beat up all the time.

_Your need a shortstop between your brain and your mouth_ , Sam had said.

_You’re an irritating little shit_ , his dad often said.

But Bucky laughed at that, just a little warm sound, and turned to smile at Steve properly. His shiny, pretty— _don’t use that word for a boy_ , Steve told himself—hair fell off his face and Steve saw the ghost of a bruise under his cheekbone. But he smiled for real, and his lovely pink mouth and shiny teeth and definitely-not-pretty eyes all focused on Steve at once like a warm spotlight and Steve thought for a second that he was having an asthma attack, but he wasn’t.

“Well, fuck you,” said Bucky.

“Fuck you back,” said Steve, feeling like he’d found a kindred spirit.

“Be _quiet_ , boys in the back,” snapped the teacher, and Steve and Bucky shared a conspiratorial grin. Steve’s heart fluttered in his chest in a way that, probably, had nothing to do with Bucky the squirrel boy’s sweet pink and white grin and was just because of his minor congenital heart condition. Probably.

 

**Five**

 

“Hey,” said Steve, the kid who called him a squirrel, hurrying after him after summer classes let out for the day. He was huffing for real just to keep up, with legs that looked about as solid as bundles of straw sticking out from his ratty cargo shorts. The kid—Steve—was really small, too small looking for high school, with shoulders that reminded Bucky of bed knobs and flat, sweaty blond hair. His pencil was stuck behind his ear and his notebook was folded in half and stuck into his back pocket; he didn’t have a backpack. He had a defeated look about him, and a nose entirely too large for his face. Bucky liked him anyways.

“Hey,” said Bucky, and then remembered—“Oh. Sorry.” He dug Steve’s pen out of his pocket and handed it back.

“What? Oh. Thanks.” Steve stuck the pen into his mouth and tried to match his strolls to Bucky’s and Bucky continued toward the door. Bucky slowed his walk a little. “Anyways, are you gonna go to the fireworks?”

This was Bucky’s first indication that it was a holiday, even though he’d been away since 4:30 that morning. The day had just been hockey and school, and in the damp-smelling locker room and chemical coolness of the rink, the idea of a summer holiday was very far away.

“Oh, right,” he said, “Fourth of July.”

“Nuh-uh,” Steve, said, cheerily, around the pen, “’s all for me. It’s my birthday.”

He gave Bucky a shit-eating grin around the pen. He had very nice eyelashes.

“Happy birthday,” said Bucky. “So, what are you? Eleven?”

“Fuck you,” said Steve. “Fif _teen_. Come to the fireworks with me?”

They were at the door, and Bucky stopped, dropped his ungainly, heavy duffle bag off his shoulder, and took a moment to look Steve over. With his floppy hair and sweaty, stained t-shirt, he looked a little bit pitiful, but his smile was jaunty and he raised a hand to push his limp, dirty blond bangs off his forehead. He looked like he couldn’t have given less of a fuck, which was not how most people in Bucky’s life comported themselves.

“Now?” Bucky asked.

“Yeah,” said Steve, the pen clacking between his back molars and bobbing on his big flat mouth like a gangster’s cigar in a movie. “My best friend had to bail on me cuz he’s going to his Grandpa’s for a barbecue or something. C’mon, do you have plans or something?”

Bucky did—he was supposed to go back to the rink and stay till 8. His limbs were heavy and hurting with overuse, and his feet, even in his sneakers, still felt pinched and tender from the new skates he’d been breaking in. His ankles bit with pain every time he walked, and his shoulders ached dully and constantly in steady throbs, like waves.

He was supposed to go back to the rink, but he had been lugging all his gear arohnnd at school instead of leaving it in his dad’s car like usual, because Dad wouldn’t be there. His mother had talked his father into some kind of church function, which his father had grouchily agreed to on the condition that Bucky skate while he was gone.

But it _was_ a holiday.

“It’s a holiday,” Bucky said slowly, “so…the rink might be closed.”

“What rink?” said Steve.

“And I can just not check.”

“Not check what?”

“It’s a _holiday_ ,” said Bucky, more emphatically, “and he’ll be home late.”

“Who will?”

“You know what, Steve?”

“What?”

“I _don’t_ have plans. And I’ll go to the fireworks with you. I don’t think I’ve ever seen fireworks up close before.”

“Wait, really? Oh dude, we gotta go!” Steve dropped the pen from his mouth in his enthusiasm, and Bucky threw out a hand to catch it. Steve stared down at his hand.

“Here,” Bucky said.

“My spit is on that,” Steve said.

Bucky handed it back to him. Steve wiped it on his pants hurriedly and stuck it behind his ear, so he now had writing implements sticking out from both sides of his face.

“That’s a good look for you,” Bucky told him, nodding to the pen and pencil in turn and smiling. He hauled his massive duffle back over his shoulder, which protested the action painfully, but he ignored that.

“Thanks,” said Steve, faintly pink, and he leaned against the door to open it. “Let’s go see some fireworks.”

“Lead the way, birthday boy.”

“You’re weird,” said Steve, trotting ahead of him toward the city bus stop, and Bucky grinned as hard as he could remember grinning and charged after him.


End file.
